EMAIL FROM AMERICA: Of African Writers and their Uncles
Every now and
then, the white man, cursed with too much money in his pockets, rounds
up all the African writers he can find and sends them off to a
conference somewhere exotic and romantic (rarely ever in black Africa)
and instructs them to engage in discourse on the African situation.
These writers are usually resident abroad, away from Africa’s
unnecessary roughness. I call these gatherings pity parties because
after a few glasses of cheap red wine, the writers become weepy and
whiny and start making pathetic statements about, the burden of being
an African writer or a writer of colour, the limitations such labels
clamp on them and their long suffering muses, whine, whine, whine. I
wish they would invite me to these affairs. I love cheap red wine.
It is true that
the West for whatever reason is more comfortable seeing people of
colour, especially Africans, as the other. Nothing we do makes us
escape the label of the other. Chinua Achebe wrote ‘Things Fall Apart’,
one of the world’s greatest books of all times. The other day, a major
newspaper in the West described it as an African novel about a simple
yam farmer. But then, many African writers or writers of African
extraction living abroad are truly divorced from Africa and her myriad
issues; forget the lush writing about Africa. Having being raised
“white and civilised” through no fault of theirs, they chafe violently
when referred to as anything other than what identifies them as
remotely removed from Africa. They wave their wine glasses at the
world, shake their ice cream spoons indignantly and exclaim, how dare
you call me African? It is not their fault. They were raised to eat
their cake and have it. They are really no different from the rest of
the African intellectual and political class misruling African nations
today, raised to be smug, conceited and lacking in principles and
compassion. These misrulers ignore the squalor around them that Africa
has become, they loot funds, they build islands of heaven for
themselves and they jet to the West to check that rash on their knee
and proclaim their humanity to the West in their fake accents.
When you examine
African writing or writing from the writers of African extraction, one
thing is clear; it is blessed with an abundant narrowness of range and
vision. There is the understandable obsession with everything African.
In their writings, huts, moons, stars, fearsome masquerades, wars and
malevolent spirits come tumbling out, chased by constipated army
generals. The most unprincipled of them hawk these exotica to the
delight of bored suburbanites in the West. Distance and time don’t seem
to matter to these folks. If you have been in America for three
decades, rarely going home to visit, what about contemporary Africa
would inspire you to write an African story worth reading?
Do not get me
wrong: I truly believe that many of our writers write with a genuine
social conscience and indeed are too busy thinking about real social
issues to worry about whatever name they are called. Indeed, the sad
truth is that the story of modern Africa is a single story of
deprivation, pillage, abuse and mayhem in the hands of her black
misrulers. The white man did not invent today’s single story, we did.
He may have come over to our ancestral land to upend the mango cart,
but today we are the ones raping, and pillaging Africa and generally
making life miserable for our people. That is the single story. It is
virtually impossible to write about anything else. The political elite
aided by our unprincipled intellectual elite have lain to ruins all
institutions and structures that sustain robust states elsewhere. It is
profitable to blame the white man for our ineptitude because suffused
with guilt he rewards our irresponsibility with even more grants and
awards. The white man loves to play uncle to us.
As African writers, we must get off our high horses and help the
people who denied themselves everything to save us from that which we
now abhor. Memo to the African writer who proclaims his or her
whiteness, er, humanity at every turn: If you want to be known as just
another writer, simply write whatever truly rocks your boat. If you
feel no obligation to be an African writer, by all means, stop being
one. Be a plain vanilla writer, living in the West. Why not write about
America? Look out your window in America and write about deer gamboling
on your manicured lawn. Look out your windows and write about the
majesty of the land that adopted you and freed you from the harshness
of Africa. Sing the praises of those that clothe and nurture you daily.
And when you are done, chronicle and clothe their neuroses and
anxieties with the awesome power of your words. If you are a writer and
all your five books have been about suffering in Soweto, the white man
should be forgiven for calling you an African writer. Get over it.
